Stefano Cagnato as Titus, Rudi Goddard as Lavinia and Manuel Garcia as Soldier rehearse a scene from the Festival Playhouse production of William Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus, " which will run Nov. 1-4 at the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse on Kalamazoo College's campus.Photo by Lanny Potts

If you go

"Titus Andronicus"

When: 7:30 p.m., Nov. 1; 8 p.m. Nov. 2-3; 2 p.m. Nov. 4.

Where: Nelda K. Balch Playhouse, Kalamazoo College

Cost: Nov. 1 "pay what you want," other days $15, seniors $10, students $5.

Contact: 269-337-7333.

KALAMAZOO, MI --Kalamazoo College will dive into the bloodbath of the rarely-staged Shakespeare tragedy "Titus Andronicus" Nov. 1-4.

"It's Shakespeare's slasher flick, his horror movie," director Kevin Dodd said. Due to horrific moments of murder, rape, dismemberment and even cannibalism which seem gratuitous, it has rarely been staged. Dodd has made an effort to turn the play into a commentary on war.

"The play is a revenge play, but I see it as really being about cycles of violence, and what happens when no one stops them," he said.

"Titus Andronicus" was one of Shakespeare's first plays, written in a then-popular -- and still-popular, considering the slasher film genre -- bloody style. Other classical tragedies like "Oedipus Rex" would be staged at the time "where they would actually bring a bull on stage, sacrifice it and pull out its entrails," Dodd said.

There has been some renewed interest in the tragedy in modern times. Julie Taymor's "Titus" (which starred Anthony Hopkins again getting into cannibalism) was called by Roger Ebert, "Scream 1593."

"We don't go to that extreme," Dodd said. The gore will be suggestive -- one scene is inspired by the end of the 1995 film "Seven," where a loved-one's head is delivered in a box.

But some of the 27 cast members won't make it to the end of the play. "There's a high body count.... some people lose limbs. Some people get baked into pies. It is a bit extreme," Dodd said.

It exists in a fictional Rome, where general Titus returns from a ten-year war with the Goths.

In revenge, he sacrifices a son of the Queen of the Goths, which results in a cycle of more revenge.

To highlight the root cause of this violence, war, Dodd has added a "chorus of collateral damage.... All people who are ghosts, essentially, who have died as side-effects of war, from contemporary wars."

Student actors have studied victims of wars from WWII to Iraq, from children killed by bombs to veterans who've committed suicide. "They found true stories of people, then developed monologs to tell their story."

The chorus haunts Titus on stage -- the original story didn't need to be modified much for these ghosts, since Titus' extreme violence is shown by Shakespeare as symptom of madness.

"They think he's totally insane," Dodd said. But in this version, he's also haunted by the ghosts who "represent the dead from war that he's responsible for."

Two lines of modern criticism of "Titus" either state that the violence is way over-the-top, or, compared to actual war atrocities and terrorism, not realistic enough.

"I've been thinking along the same lines," Dod said. Violence is in the news every day, in the background, he said. "I really want to bring this to the forefront, say that this has become background noise, but should it be? Should we be paying more attention to this and try to do something about it?"

When his actors read the script, they exclaimed that, "wow, this is so over-the-top, so out-there," Dodd said.

But he talked about it to a friend who had worked with Doctors Without Borders. "She worked with amputees, who'd had their hands cut off in war, in the Congo and Somalia. She said, yeah, everything in this play has been happening in Africa in these wars, people chopping off people's hands with machetes, or making people eat their family members after they've killed them," he said.